John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, once said that Lenin was the most loved and the most hated person alive. He was loved by tens of millions who wanted to change society, but hated by the ruling class and their apologists.

As the creator of the Bolshevik Party and leader of the Russian Revolution, Lenin was a man who changed the world and translated the ideas of Marxism into reality.

Today, one hundred years after his death, the bourgeois historians continue to vilify and slander Lenin's life and ideas. This book sets out to definitively answer these distortions, putting forward a defence of the real Lenin and the ideas he stood for. Given the ongoing capitalist crisis, his ideas are gaining an increasingly wide echo. In so many ways, Lenin is more relevant today than ever before.

Over two volumes, this book traces Lenin's life and work, drawing on the colossal heritage left behind in his own writings. This book also features an appendix of Krupskaya's writings on Lenin, a chronology, and over 250 images.

Volume One covers the years from Lenin's youth to the February Revolution in 1917. These are the years in which Bolshevism took shape, from its theoretical beginnings among the first Russian Marxists to the Bolshevik Party's experiences in the 1905 Revolution and the First World War.